So this week, one of the teachers at our school named “Dany” is hosting his cousin. Dany told us his cousin, Reagan, is applying to university in the U.S. So we asked Reagan about it, and discovered that he’s applying to Augsburg, Luther, and St. Olaf. How weird! I don’t know what his chances are of getting in, but we’re going to help him with his application later today.
The only other fun news I have is that Mario is coming soon! Hopefully we’ll see him on Tuesday. He only has a week off for spring break (all the Iringa universities have 3 weeks… figures), so he’ll only be here a few days, but it will still be a welcome change. Emily and I are very excited.
In other news, 3 more Americans are coming this week. They’re supposed to leave today from the US, so they might show up in Magulilwa around the same time as Mario. We don’t really have solid information on who they are, what they’ll be doing, or how long they’ll be staying. Hopefully they won’t disrupt our life balance too much. At least they’re bringing us chocolate.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
Game Day
Form IIIA was 2 periods ahead of Form IIIB because of stupid schedule problems, so on Friday last week and Monday this week, Form IIIA had the pleasure of Game Day and an American English class while IIIB was catching up.
Game Day included 3-legged races, Simon Says, and the human knot. 3-legged races kind of failed, but Simon Says was a hit. We used it to practice action verbs and prepositions, and it was great to have the “but Simon didn’t say!” caveat thrown in to make them think. Emily and I acted quite juvenile when people did things wrong, pointing at them and yelling “OHH!!” so that the rest of the class would see them doing whatever it was wrong, and laughing at us and each other helped them get into the game actually. We’d never get away with that in a U.S. classroom, but here it works out.
The human knot went really well too. It has little to do with English, but it works on logic, something that sometimes is lacking from this education system. Groups stand in a circle, and grab the hands of two other people across the circle from them. Then they have to maneuver themselves so that they are untangled. That’s the best I can explain. But they did it really well, infinitely better than my Form I class did the first week of school. The best part was when a normally very quiet girl was totally taking charge of her group and telling them what to do (and rocking it), and then when they had finished she went around to other groups to help them.
Our American English class was completely hilarious. We taught things like “What’s up?” (which, as one of our students pointed out, makes absolutely no sense), and “How’s it going?” We also taught them to pronounce things in a more American way. Instead of saying “good morning,” we say something more like “guhmornin.” But by far the most hilarious part was explaining all the different ways to say “yes,” “no,” and “I don’t know.”
Yes. Yep. Yup. Yeah. Uh-huh. Mhmm.
No. Nope. Nah. Nu-uh. Uh-uh. Mm-mm.
I don’t know. I dunno. Idno. (and then the sound we make similar uh-uh, and the one similar to mm-mm, accompanied by a shoulder shrug).
We had them repeat all of them, and then all of the similar sounds (i.e. all the mm ones) in succession. A lot of them thought it was hilarious, especially “yep” and “yeah,” and now whenever we ask them at the end of class if they have understood, someone always answers with one of those. It’s pretty funny that now we sort of have a bunch of inside jokes with that class. Anyway, that’s all that I have for today.
Game Day included 3-legged races, Simon Says, and the human knot. 3-legged races kind of failed, but Simon Says was a hit. We used it to practice action verbs and prepositions, and it was great to have the “but Simon didn’t say!” caveat thrown in to make them think. Emily and I acted quite juvenile when people did things wrong, pointing at them and yelling “OHH!!” so that the rest of the class would see them doing whatever it was wrong, and laughing at us and each other helped them get into the game actually. We’d never get away with that in a U.S. classroom, but here it works out.
The human knot went really well too. It has little to do with English, but it works on logic, something that sometimes is lacking from this education system. Groups stand in a circle, and grab the hands of two other people across the circle from them. Then they have to maneuver themselves so that they are untangled. That’s the best I can explain. But they did it really well, infinitely better than my Form I class did the first week of school. The best part was when a normally very quiet girl was totally taking charge of her group and telling them what to do (and rocking it), and then when they had finished she went around to other groups to help them.
Our American English class was completely hilarious. We taught things like “What’s up?” (which, as one of our students pointed out, makes absolutely no sense), and “How’s it going?” We also taught them to pronounce things in a more American way. Instead of saying “good morning,” we say something more like “guhmornin.” But by far the most hilarious part was explaining all the different ways to say “yes,” “no,” and “I don’t know.”
Yes. Yep. Yup. Yeah. Uh-huh. Mhmm.
No. Nope. Nah. Nu-uh. Uh-uh. Mm-mm.
I don’t know. I dunno. Idno. (and then the sound we make similar uh-uh, and the one similar to mm-mm, accompanied by a shoulder shrug).
We had them repeat all of them, and then all of the similar sounds (i.e. all the mm ones) in succession. A lot of them thought it was hilarious, especially “yep” and “yeah,” and now whenever we ask them at the end of class if they have understood, someone always answers with one of those. It’s pretty funny that now we sort of have a bunch of inside jokes with that class. Anyway, that’s all that I have for today.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Ok, elaborating...
I’m loving teaching Form I because it’s a perfect storm of me knowing what I’m doing this time around with their syllabus, and them just being awesome. They’re just totally willing to humor me in my seeming craziness, and will ask clarifying questions instead of giving me blank stares (ahem… Form IIIB). Just the fact that they will actually say “no” loud enough that I can hear it when I ask if they understand, is huge.
But in an interesting turn of events, half of Form III has turned out to be fun as well! We had an excellent period with Form IIIA this week.
We were teaching past tense “if” clauses, which are for “unlikely situations. First we had to teach the meaning of unlikely, so me being who I am, I had to give them some sassy examples like “if all the dodgers of Form IIIA came to class, that would be an unlikely event.” It was hilarious then to see the light bulbs going on because they would get this smirk like they were thinking “oh, wouldn’t it be funny if I said this?” When we asked for examples, then, some of the students threw some sass back at us, which I loved. One said “If boys at MASS wore skirts,” a delightful throwback to our essay lessons.
In the middle of the lesson, we taught the grammar of these “if” clauses by making chains, starting “If we all CAME to class, we WOULD LEARN more. If we LEARNED more, we WOULD PASS our exams,” etc. Changing those tenses was pretty tricky, but they understood the idea. To end the class, we did chains like that starting with “If I had a billion shillings” (the rough equivalent of a million dollars), and had a good time with their answers. My part of the chain ended up being “If I moved to Dar-es-Salaam, I would wear trousers every day.” Hehe.
But in an interesting turn of events, half of Form III has turned out to be fun as well! We had an excellent period with Form IIIA this week.
We were teaching past tense “if” clauses, which are for “unlikely situations. First we had to teach the meaning of unlikely, so me being who I am, I had to give them some sassy examples like “if all the dodgers of Form IIIA came to class, that would be an unlikely event.” It was hilarious then to see the light bulbs going on because they would get this smirk like they were thinking “oh, wouldn’t it be funny if I said this?” When we asked for examples, then, some of the students threw some sass back at us, which I loved. One said “If boys at MASS wore skirts,” a delightful throwback to our essay lessons.
In the middle of the lesson, we taught the grammar of these “if” clauses by making chains, starting “If we all CAME to class, we WOULD LEARN more. If we LEARNED more, we WOULD PASS our exams,” etc. Changing those tenses was pretty tricky, but they understood the idea. To end the class, we did chains like that starting with “If I had a billion shillings” (the rough equivalent of a million dollars), and had a good time with their answers. My part of the chain ended up being “If I moved to Dar-es-Salaam, I would wear trousers every day.” Hehe.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Form I
I love Form I!!
This is a chorus that Emily gets to hear 4 days a week when i come back from teaching that class. I teach this class, as I said before, using a lot of Swahili (I'm a bilingual teacher! how cool is that?), and because the class is very elementary English, it's stuff that we can do fun activities with.
This week, I was teaching adjectives describing character, and I gave working definitions in swahili and then just had the kids act like a rude person, or a generous person, etc. and they ate it up. And all of them come to class EVERY DAY. It's amazing. Sorry time's running out, but hopefully I'll be able to elaborate next week.
This is a chorus that Emily gets to hear 4 days a week when i come back from teaching that class. I teach this class, as I said before, using a lot of Swahili (I'm a bilingual teacher! how cool is that?), and because the class is very elementary English, it's stuff that we can do fun activities with.
This week, I was teaching adjectives describing character, and I gave working definitions in swahili and then just had the kids act like a rude person, or a generous person, etc. and they ate it up. And all of them come to class EVERY DAY. It's amazing. Sorry time's running out, but hopefully I'll be able to elaborate next week.
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